Liberal Racists Warn of Chaos

Only the left has a problem with an interracial political marriage.

"A Democratic group is under sharp criticism for controversial online messages about Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell's wife," reports WFPL-FM, an NPR station in Louisville, Ky. For months Progress Kentucky, a liberal super PAC, has been stalking McConnell, the Bluegrass State's senior senator, holding "demonstrations at his offices and home."

ENLARGE

The McConnells
Associated Press

But the attack on Mrs. McConnell, who in public goes by her maiden name of Elaine Chao, took place on Twitter. The station quotes a Progress Kentucky tweet dated Feb. 14: "This woman has the ear of (Sen. McConnell)—she's his wife. May explain why your job moved to China!" That was followed by a link to what WFPL describes as "a website run by conspiracy theorist and radio host Jeff Rense, alleging Chao, who was born in Taiwan, discriminated against American workers during her tenure." Chao served as labor secretary from 2001 through 2009.

The station quoted Curtis Morrison, a spokesman for Progress Kentucky: "It's not an official statement. It's a tweet. And we will remove it if it's wrong," he said. "I follow Ashley Judd on Twitter and she removed a Tweet the other day, she tweeted to you Phillip. People make mistakes in Tweets. It happens. Inferring that Elaine Chao is not a U.S. citizen was not our intention." (Ashley Judd is a loopy actress who is supposedly thinking about running against McConnell next year; Phillip Bailey is the WFPL reporter on the story.)

To judge by this quote, Morrison is a very confused man. Not only does he have difficulty distinguishing between implication and inference, but he misses the point of the complaints about his organization's tweet. The issue isn't Chao's citizenship status but the racially invidious nature of Progress Kentucky's attack on her.

Finally Shawn Reilly, Progress Kentucky's executive director, acknowledged the problem, telling Bailey in a follow-up report that the tweet "included an inappropriate comment on [Chao's] ethnicity." He added: "We apologize to the secretary for that unnecessary comment and have deleted the tweets in question. In addition, we have put a review process in place to ensure tweets and other social media communications from Progress Kentucky are reviewed and approved prior to posting." Maybe they should seek preclearance from the Justice Department.

McConnell and Chao have been married since 1993, and in all that time we don't remember a conservative or a Republican making an issue of her race or national origin. Since the wedding, McConnell has won re-election three times, suggesting that neither Republicans nor general-election voters in Kentucky--a state where slavery wasn't abolished until 1865--are bothered that their senator is in an interracial marriage.

Other than conspiracy nuts, the only people who seem bothered by it are the liberals at Progress Kentucky.

The National Rifle Association is using a Justice Department memo it obtained to argue in ads that the Obama administration believes its gun control plans won't work unless the government seizes firearms and requires national gun registration--ideas the White House has not proposed and does not support.

The NRA's assertion and its obtaining of the memo in the first place underscore the no-holds-barred battle under way as Washington's fight over gun restrictions heats up.

The memo, under the name of one of the Justice Department's leading crime researchers, critiques the effectiveness of gun control proposals, including some of President Barack Obama's. A Justice Department official called the memo an unfinished review of gun violence research and said it does not represent administration policy.

Imagine the situation in reverse: A left-wing group releases a Justice Department memo that, it argues, suggests a Republican administration intends to curtail civil liberties despite the White House's public claims to the contrary.

Is it even imaginable that the AP would frame the left-wing civil-liberties group as the aggressor in a "no-holds-barred battle" the way it has here, or would flatly accept a Republican White House's assurance about its own intentions, as it does in the very first paragraph of this dispatch?

Ground Chuck Despite his manifest lack of qualification--or did we just have a Fox Butterfield moment there?--the Senate yesterday confirmed Chuck Hagel as defense secretary. The vote was 58-41, with only four Republicans--Mississippi's Thad Cochran, Nebraska's Mike Johanns, Kentucky's Rand Paul and Alabama's Richard Shelby--voting in favor.

Hagel's reputation took a beating during the confirmation process, which is primarily to say that people who had never heard of him before now know who he is. But perhaps the biggest indication of how he has fallen came in a New York Times editorial published yesterday. The Times, which supports pretty much anything President Obama does except when it is beneficial to national security, wrote: "A decorated Vietnam veteran, Mr. Hagel is one of a fading breed of moderate Republicans."

But a Times editorial of Jan. 8 described Hagel as "one of a fading breed of sensible moderate Republicans." A Times editorial of Feb. 1 echoed the sentiment, describing Hagel as "among a fading breed of sensible, moderate Republicans." (Both editorials also mentioned Hagel's status as a "decorated" Vietnam veteran.)

It's as if we suddenly described John Kerry as the haughty secretary of state who by the way served in Vietnam. By revising its boilerplate Hagel language, the paper has quietly acknowledged it can no longer defend its description of the new defense secretary as sensible. For once we suspect the Times editorial page will be proved right.

A Big Month for Non Sequiturs Maybe we were too hasty in giving the Chicago Sun-Times's Neil Steinberg the Non Sequitur of the Month award Monday. It's not that he doesn't deserve it, but that so much new competition has arisen in the waning days of February 2013. Here's Thomas Friedman in today's New York Times:

Visiting Mexico this past week reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from my days in Beirut. It was when a hostess asked her dinner guests during the Lebanese civil war: "Would you like to eat now or wait for the cease-fire?" One of the lessons of both Mexico and Lebanon is how irrepressible is the human spirit--that no matter how violent a country becomes, people will adapt and take risks to innovate or to make profits or get to school or to just have fun.

If there's a lesson in that anecdote, it's about either the fine line between comedy and tragedy or the use of dark humor as a coping mechanism in stressful times.

The Christian Science Monitor, meanwhile, has a story under the headline: "Just as Nixon Went to China, Should Obama Go to Iran?" The analogy makes no sense. "Only Nixon can go to China," as the ancient Vulcan proverb has it. But that's because Nixon had such strong anticommunist credentials that no one could accuse him of being soft on the Reds.

An analogous figure would be a U.S. politician who's been especially critical of Iran's mad mullahs--maybe John McCain or Joe Lieberman. Obama is at the other end of the spectrum. He once followed a "spiritual mentor" whose view of America was similar to the ayatollahs', and he ran for office in 2008 saying he wanted to talk to the Iranian regime. Which is another problem with the Monitor headline: Whether or not Obama "should go to Iran" is quite irrelevant inasmuch as there's no reason to think the Iranian rulers would let him in.

Great Moments in Public Education "A California high school student was shocked at what she found when she decided to play detective and stop a string of thefts from backpacks during gym class," ABC News reports:

Justine Betti said she decided to hide in a locker to see if she could catch the thief in action. She didn't expect the alleged culprit to be her gym teacher.

After all of the students left the locker room, the teacher stayed behind, rummaged through backpacks and took money, Betti said. . . .

Betti . . . eventually took the video to her principal with some friends.

"He said that he'll investigate it and he told us to delete the video, but I had already sent it to my dad," she said.

The video was not destroyed, and ABC shows it with the rummager's face obscured. But a case could be made for prosecuting the principal for obstruction of justice.

Come Fly With Me From a Puffington Host post by Evangeline Lilly, an actress we haven't heard of:

I boarded a jet plane this past Friday and traveled 16 hours through the night to Washington, D.C. I was back on a plane again on Monday morning flying the reverse 16 hours back home. I was in Washington with over 40,000 other protesters for the Forward on Climate Rally, to call President Obama to say "no" to the [Keystone XL] pipeline.

The journey was long and on the way there I read Tim Flannery's Now or Never, an inspiring (short) read on the state of the planet in the face of climate change. On the way back I was too exhausted to read or do anything productive, so I watched b-movies and contemplated my experience at the largest climate rally in U.S. history.

OK, there's one thing about this story we don't understand. If the plane was solar powered, how did she fly at night?

"Still, only a small percentage--about 2.5%--of American workers primarily work from home despite congested roadways, long commutes and the demands of caring for young children or elderly parents."--Jessica Guynn, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 26

"In quoting the superintendent in an earlier version of this story, a sentence read, 'He said officials have reason to believe that anyone is in danger.' That was an error on our part. The sentence should have read, 'He said officials have no reason to believe that anyone is in danger.' "--WHTM-TV website (Harrisburg, Pa.), Feb. 26

"A picture caption on Saturday with an article about concerns over a proposed liquid petroleum tank in the Maine coastal town of Searsport described incorrectly opponents of the tank who were shown standing in a circle and holding hands. They were demonstrating the tank's circumference, not its diameter."--New York Times, Feb. 27

The Print Business Is Really Hurting "With the current minimum wage, employees working full time make $15,000, according to Forbes Magazine, which is oftentimes below the poverty line."--Cady Zuvich, Review (University of Delaware), Feb. 25

The Onion Imitates Us

"Cuba Democracia y Vida, a Sweden-based exile site, claims that Fidel Castro is dead, attributing the information to, as Google's rough translation puts it, 'a source near the Cuban regime of total credibility.' Havana has been holding back the announcement, the story says, while awaiting the results of the election in Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez, a younger, less dead version of Castro, is leading his challenger by 62% to 37%."--Best of the Web Today, Dec. 5, 2006

A Whale of a Time "Will Journalism Go the Way of Whaling?" asks a headline on the New York Times's Opinionator blog. It's one of those dialogues between Gail Collins and David Brooks, so we don't need to read it to know it's inane. But we were so amused by reader Bob Acker's riff on the headline that we thought we'd quote it here:

"Will journalism go the way of whaling? You mean, will it be something the Japanese do on the sly? That might be rather amusing. I remember seeing an English-language sign in Japan--of course, it was at a ride at the amusement park--that said, 'You will be brandished and inverted. Can you stand the fear?' The idea of covering an Obama presser with stuff like that--and clandestinely to boot--OMG, can you stand the fear?"

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